


Get Out In Times of Declared Emergency

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Depression, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Vessel Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-10
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 16:30:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6813187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>PREACHER: Is it going to be alllllllllright?<br/>CONGREGATION: It's going to be alright!</p>
<p>--Firesign Theater</p>
<p>Castiel post-Lucifer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Out In Times of Declared Emergency

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to akamarykate for graciously (and helpfully!) answering my frazzled last-minute plea for beta.

In the early stages of Lucifer's eviction, he clings to Castiel's grace for purchase. _You're a shell, Castiel,_ he hisses. _I give you purpose. Without me, what do you have? What are you?_

As he is torn free, so does he tear.

Castiel awakens to a cement floor gritty and unforgiving under his back, the pungent heat of holy fire heavy in his breath and on his skin. He stares straight up at shadowy metal catwalks crisscrossing a distant warehouse ceiling. When the smoke and dust wafting through the room itch his open eyes too much to bear, he's surprised when the impulse to blink translates into action. He's been unable to control his vessel so easily for months.

With that small motion comes the full realisation that he feels minor irritations and pain. He's breathing. His throat is parched, his tongue thick in his mouth. He's exhausted.

Not his vessel, then. His body, now. Again.

He blinks again, mechanically.

He feels empty. He feels small. The warehouse is a cavern around him, but its vast drafty space is dwarfed by his immense nothingness inside.

Somewhere outside the ring of flames, Dean and Sam are calling his name.

Slowly, his control of his own movements rusty and tentative, Castiel rolls onto his side and curls around his hollowness.

* * *

Sam spills a bucketful of sand across the floor, smothering an arc of the circle.

Castiel turns from the gap to where the holy fire still burns. If he still had even a glimmer of grace, crossing anywhere but the gap would spark a flashover: his death throes would vaporise his friends and melt the warehouse to liquid rock and slag. Instead, the low flames warm the soles of his shoes, maybe singe the cuffs of his pants.

As soon as he's out of the circle, Dean seizes him in a hug.

"What the hell were you thinking, Cas?" he demands, his voice raw and thick and close. His lips accidentally brush Castiel's ear. "You could've--you can't--"

His arms hang at his sides. He locks his quavering knees against the temptation to sag against Dean's solidity. He thinks, _I'm sorry, Dean,_ then remembers his vocal apparatus is back under his own control. "I'm sorry, Dean."

Dean's arms clench tighter before he lets go and steps back. His hand lingers on Castiel's shoulder. He ducks his head, trying very hard to catch Castiel's fugitive gaze. "You okay? You went a little fetal on us for a minute there."

Lucifer is gone. Amara is not. Castiel is still alive, and the tasks he set himself when he said yes to Lucifer are only partly done. "I'm fine."

"You're fine? That's it?" The hand on Castiel's shoulder drags away. He sways, unmoored. "Lucifer, Cas! Why the fuck-- And unless we really fucked up that holy fire, it looks like he helped himself to a parting gift on his way out!"

Sam draws up beside them, dusting sand from his hands. "Hey, okay--"

"He is not 'fine', Sam!"

"Maybe. But isn't that our standard line when we don't want to talk about something?" In Castiel's periphery, Dean shoots his brother an incredulous glare. "Look, we got him back. Now let's get him home. The debrief can wait 'til we're back at the bunker."

Castiel supposes he should be annoyed at being discussed without being included. But he's exhausted, and empty, and the open assumption that he'll be going with them to the bunker makes a thread of pathetic gratitude stitch up any will towards obstinacy.

Besides, they all know he has nowhere else to go.

"Whatever. " Dean turns sharply from his silent disagreement with Sam. "Let's get this shit cleaned up so we can go."

As Dean stomps off, Sam hangs back. "Sorry about that," he says, a wry note in his voice. "He, ah. He was worried. We both were." His hand lands, broad and kind, where Dean's was on Castiel's shoulder. "We're glad you're back, Cas."

Castiel makes the mistake of looking up: Sam is smiling warmly down at him, written all over with earnest relief. A low weariness unfurls in the pit of Castiel's stomach. He hadn't thought they'd be so troubled.

* * *

They drive away from the warehouse in the dead of night. By the time they reach the bunker, dawn has started to bleed into the sky.

Once inside, Castiel is given many things: a small, perfunctory bedroom; a toothbrush; a set of folded clothes, sweatpants and a t-shirt and socks. 

"Debrief can wait 'til morning," Dean says gruffly as he hands over the clothes. He spoke sparingly during the long drive, but his voice is hoarse as if he's been shouting. His face is drawn and pale, his bloodshot eyes set deep in puffy shadows. Sam looked much the same when he brought the toothbrush. Castiel thinks dully that they must have been pushing themselves very hard lately to be so obviously exhausted. "Get some sleep, Cas."

Castiel realises after he leaves that the clothes are Dean's. They're worn soft and thin, and smell faintly of detergent and cedar.

He puts them on the desk, strips to his boxers, and goes to bed.

Morning arrives shortly after two o'clock in the afternoon. The smell of coffee and the sound of vehement voices pitched low lead Castiel to the kitchen, where Dean stands by the sink and Sam sits at the table and their conversation stops the moment he enters.

They give him more things: a cup of strong coffee; a plate of toast and eggs and ham; inscrutable sidelong glances and, from Sam, small, reassuring smiles.

"So," Dean begins after Castiel has taken fifteen minutes to swallow three bites of eggs and sip twice at his coffee, "about that debrief."

Castiel puts down his fork beside his congealing plate. "I didn't intend to make myself a hostage," he says. "Lucifer said he could stop Amara. He couldn't. As usual, my intentions didn't matter." He stands. "Excuse me. I'm still very tired."

He makes it to the door before Dean's belated, bewildered, "Cas--" is followed on its heels by Sam's quiet, "Let him go, Dean." Their voices rise and fall behind him as he returns to the bedroom and closes himself in.

The next time he ventures out, they're in the library. Sam gives him a nod over his open laptop; Dean barely glances at him before saying coolly, "Hey, Sleeping Beauty," and picking up the beer at his elbow. Neither of them ask.

His fingertips prickling with shame, Castiel doesn't volunteer.

* * *

Castiel sits on the bed in the room he's been given and stares at his phone.

After a while, he types, **Hello, Claire,** then stares at the message long enough for the screen to go black. Longer. Eventually, he wakes up the phone and hits send.

Usually, Claire responds promptly, but long seconds tick past with no answering text bubble. He waits, thumb hovering uncertainly over the screen.

Down the hall, almost too far away for his newly-human ears to hear through the bunker's thick walls, someone's phone rings. Dean's voice answers at normal volume, then continues hushed.

By the time Castiel's phone finally vibrates with an incoming message, doubt is crawling in his stomach.

_hey Cas the old man said you're feeling better_

Castiel reads the message over again, puzzled. He's about to ask when realisation cores him: Dean must have warned Claire away from any communication with him while Lucifer was in residence.

It was an appearance of precaution at best. Had Lucifer chosen to target Claire, avoiding his phone calls wouldn't have protected her in any meaningful way. Still, the warning is more consideration than Castiel gave her, in his rush to feel useful.

His phone buzzes again. _Cas?_

He scrubs his free hand over his face, gathering himself. **I'm here.**

_yeah finally_

_where you been anyway? been awhile since I got any bee emojis_

Another thing he hadn't considered: that Claire would mark his absence, even by something as frivolous as a decline in the number of cartoon bees in her messages.

_or cat emojis_

_or if you don't wanna talk about it that's cool_

Castiel doesn't want to talk about it. That's not why he contacted her. This conversation isn't going at all as he'd expected. He'd thought he would say hello, and she would respond immediately that he was bothering her; he would apologise and ask what he was distracting her from, and she would flood his phone with nearly incomprehensible comments about college applications or household chores or what she and Jody and Alex had done on their last weekend. He'd thought only one of his mistakes--the old, scarring-over wound of what he'd done to her family--would underlay their words.

He'd thought she wouldn't have noticed he'd been gone at all.

His hand is cold where it's clenched around his phone. His fingers move stiffly. **It's good to hear from you, Claire.**

_yeah you too_

_Cas?_

_still there?_

Castiel turns off his phone and drops it on the bed.

Sometime later, Dean knocks lightly on his door, pushing it open with his knuckles. An open beer bottle dangles from the loose curl of his fingers. "So you're texting Claire," he says. He sounds strange, somehow both hearty and tentative. He's sounded strange in some way or another every time he's spoken to Castiel since Lucifer left. "That's good, man. She went through some stuff while you were, uh." He clears his throat. The hand holding the beer rises partway to his mouth before stalling out and lowering again. "It's good that you let her know you're okay."

Castiel doesn't miss the insinuated rebuke for causing Claire to worry. His attention also catches on whatever incident Dean elided as 'some stuff'. Guilt flares up to war briefly with resignation before both settle into their well-worn hollows between his ribs. "Thank you for looking out for her."

Dean looks surprised--Castiel doesn't want to call it pleased--at the quiet civility. "Of course, man. All things considered, she's actually a good kid." His mouth and his brow quirk conspiratorially. "But don't tell her I said so."

In a moment of perversity, Castiel wants to ask why not. Why shouldn't Claire know about Dean's good opinion? What would be so terrible about letting her know that her existence is more than just tolerated? That she's appreciated? Cared for? That her efforts to survive in the wake of devastating loss are understood, maybe even forgiven? That her wellbeing matters?

Of course, less than an hour ago, Castiel had been berating himself for failing to think of Claire at all, much less her wellbeing and its importance to him. His contrariness turns to contrition, imperfect and ashamed.

By the time he thinks to glance up from his downward-spiralling thoughts, Dean's open good humour has shuttered. There's a hard glint in his eyes; his jaw is tight. Castiel doesn't want to call it disappointment. "Okay, then," Dean says, as if to himself. As he turns from the doorway to head back down the hall, he lifts his beer to his mouth, swallows and swallows.

* * *

"Now that you've got a room of your own, I thought you'd like one of these to go with it."

Sam has brought him a television set. It's small and slim and still in its box from the store. Anxiety flutters to life in Castiel's chest. "You didn't have to--"

"I wanted to," Sam says firmly.

Castiel lets him brush past.

"I don't know if you ever watched Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," Sam says, putting the TV on the chest of drawers at the end of Castiel's bed and starting to unbox it, "but Eileen likes it, and she said season two's really good--"

Castiel pauses in his retreat to the corner opposite Sam and his gift. "Who's Eileen?"

"Eileen, from the banshee case." Sam glances up expectantly from prying the TV free of its packing foam. Castiel looks back helplessly. He knows nothing about a banshee case. "At the nursing home, remember? I texted you about it. It was a couple months back, not long after--"

The timeframe, and the way Sam's face falls as he cuts himself off, clarify things.

"Oh."

"It's all right."

"No, I'm sorry, Cas. I mean, looking back, Lucifer wasn't great at pretending to be you, but at the time--"

At the time, because Castiel had made his decision alone and in haste, there had been no reason for anyone to suspect he wasn't himself. "It's all right, Sam."

Sam watches him for a moment before turning back to the TV. "Eileen's a Woman of Letters," he begins. "A legacy, like me and Dean. We met her on a banshee case at a nursing home a couple months ago."

He tells Castiel about the hunt as he sets up the television: positioning it on the chest of drawers, connecting all the necessary cables, cycling through all the necessary menus. Castiel hovers in his corner and tries to let Sam's story distract him. Eileen sounds like a very capable hunter, and Sam speaks warmly of her as a person. Castiel hopes he can meet her someday. Sam smiles when he tells him so.

When the TV is ready to be watched, Sam offers the remote control, eyebrows up, encouraging.

The flutter under Castiel's breastbone knots up hard. "Thank you, Sam." He makes himself take the remote, then puts it down immediately on the desk.

Sam's geniality sobers. Castiel chastises himself for spoiling what was clearly meant as a gesture of comfort. "Cas, I want to tell you something."

"Sam--"

"When Lucifer had me, he said that everything he did, he did because I wanted it." Sam looks at him squarely, calmly. "I'd said yes to him because I knew I was supposed to be his. Everyone he killed was someone I wanted dead. Everyone I hurt was someone who'd hurt me first."

Castiel shakes his head. "Lucifer lies."

"I know," Sam agrees easily. "And I knew it then. I knew my reasons for saying yes, and I knew that the things he used me to do--the things he made me watch him do--weren't anything I'd said yes to. But I also knew that none of that mattered, because _I said yes_."

"You were a conquest, Sam. The fact of your permission doesn't change that. You were his conquest, and he wanted to impress that upon you however he could." An image of Dean at Stull Cemetery, broken and bloody and devastated, rises in Castiel's memory. He can imagine Sam's horror as his hands were used to beat Lucifer's triumph into Dean.

He'd felt something similar when Lucifer intended to use his own hands to pulp Sam's soul. He'd fought then, for the first and only time. Afterward, all his horror had been for himself: for the need to feel useful that had caused him to make such an immense mistake; for his rash, unthinking endangerment of the people he loved. And after that--

Lucifer had seen his horror and his self-loathing, and laughed. He'd watched him build his little flickering pocket of consciousness, and left him to it.

Without meaning to, Castiel says, "Mostly, he ignored me." He freezes, feeling caught. Surely Sam will intuit the rest.

Sam offers a faint, melancholy smile. "Doesn't mean you weren't trapped." 

Sam has misunderstood. His experience of Lucifer has caused him to make assumptions; his friendship with Castiel has attributed blamelessness--helplessness--where there is deliberate dereliction. Castiel despairs of having to explain exactly how their experiences differed.

Whatever shows on his face makes Sam hold up his hands, placating. "I know you don't want to talk about it. I'm not gonna push. I just wanted to tell you that I know how hard it can be to get him out of your head, even after he's gone. And when you're ready to talk, I'm here."

His eyes are round and kind and compassionate. Castiel can't look at them any longer. His gaze drops to his desk, where he finds his hand on the TV remote, his fingers curling around it as if to pick it up. He doesn't pick it up. "Thank you, Sam," he manages.

When Sam is gone, Castiel forcibly lifts his hand from the remote and looks uneasily at the television. It sits atop his dresser like a monolith. An idol of negligence. Sam has angled it perfectly for minimal glare from the lamp on his bedside table.

Castiel had watched the first season of Kimmy Schmidt while he recovered from Rowena's bestial spell. He had enjoyed it, mostly. Much of it he found incomprehensible, but he had admired Kimmy's ability to face adversity with little more than determination and her disconcertingly broad grin.

There was a time when he had turned to the miracles of God's creation for distraction from his conscience. Bees; flowers. Natural, purposeful cycles of industry.

Absently, his hand drifts back to the remote.

* * *

All Dean told Claire was that Castiel had been compromised. He wasn't himself. If he contacted her, she should inform them immediately, and avoid him.

Castiel tells her the truth. Abridged. It's still a lot of typing on his phone's small screen, but even as his fingers start to cramp, he thinks it's easier than if he were to try to say it aloud.

Claire doesn't respond for a very long time. Then:

_why'd you really say yes?_

Her question catches him off-guard. He'd explained his motives. The Darkness must be defeated. Lucifer had presented himself as a means to that end. Why would Claire not be satisfied with that?

With the familiar feeling that he's done something wrong and doesn't understand what or how fuzzing hotly at the back of his neck, he replies, **Why do you think I said yes?**

There's a long pause.

_people you love were in trouble_

_something that scared the shit out of you promised it could save them_

_you knew you'd never be enough on your own_

_tell me when I'm getting close_

* * *

Lebanon is dying.

"Rural flight," Sam says, piloting the Impala toward the town's small grocery store. In the passenger seat, Castiel watches barren fields and empty horizons slide past the windows. Sam is in need of bananas and his preferred cereal. It's hardly a mission requiring two, but Sam had tracked him down in a deep corner of the library stacks and invited him along anyway. And the alternative was to be alone in the bunker with Dean while he glowered and filled the kitchen counter with empty beer bottles. "Lots of small towns are emptying out these days. They can't really support their populations anymore. Cities have more opportunities for--well, for anyone who's not in agriculture."

Eventually, the fields give way to development. As they pass a string of small white houses with weathered FOR SALE signs staked crookedly in their shaggy lawns, Sam's fingers drum the steering wheel. "On the bright side, we don't have to deal with noisy neighbours."

The bunker is outside of Lebanon proper, but not unmanageably far from it. After the grocery run with Sam, Castiel discovers that he likes to walk into town. More precisely, he likes walking _in_ town. The stretch between the bunker and the town is made of broad fields and scraggly brush, altogether too open, too unstructured. Unsettling. Past that, though, the town unfolds in uneven sidewalks and potholed streets, a dwindling number of neatly-kept properties with warm lights in their windows and a growing number of boarded-up, dilapidated ones.

Lebanon was built to a purpose it's no longer capable of sustaining. Castiel wanders through its increasing desolation and feels it around him: something larger than himself, emptying.

* * *

"Hey, Cas. Can't sleep?"

It's just after four o'clock in the morning. At three-fifteen exactly, Castiel had blinked inexplicably from deep sleep to almost hyper-awareness. After a few minutes of enduring the excruciating stillness of his room, he'd turned on his television; after a few minutes of scrolling past titles on Netflix without retaining any of them, the static noiselessness of the menu screen growing louder and louder until it itched inside his bones, he'd relocated from his bed to a chair at the library table.

Dean stands at the edge of the lamplight dressed, as Castiel is, in sweatpants and a t-shirt, knuckling tiredly at one eye. He looks sleep-tousled, softer than Castiel has seen him in a very long time. His cheeks are stubbly. Castiel looks back down at the age-stained book open in front of him. "I thought I could be useful researching potential Hands of God."

In the long pause that follows, the bunker's heating system hums to life. Warmish air begins to circulate around Castiel's bare ankles. "I don't--Sam and me. You know we don't care if you're 'useful', right?"

Dean sounds uncertain. Possibly because what he's just said is untrue. Castiel turns a page. "I don't do well without purpose, Dean."

Another pause. Dean sighs. "Yeah, I hear that. Got any good hunches?"

Castiel's fairly certain his best hunch--Lucifer's next best hunch after his last best hunch: a cutting from the tree of Moreh, touched by God in recognition of the sacrifice Abraham made there, last located in Syria--has recently been destroyed by human militants. The blast in question killed many of the militants themselves; given the ideologies involved, if it was the Hand of God, Castiel supposes that's irony. Or perhaps a pun. "That remains to be seen."

Dean's slippers slap gently on the floor as he comes to stand over the table and survey the documents Castiel has laid out. "'Course, finding one of the damn things is only half the battle," he muses. "We still gotta get somebody to use it."

There it is, as Castiel expected. Indirect, maybe, but unmistakable. Fortunately, in this, they share an understanding of how Castiel can be useful. "I'm going to use it."

"What? No." Dean's sharp tone makes him look up; he's taken aback by the glare that meets him. "No, Cas, you're human now. You use a Hand of God, it'll burn right through you. No."

He can't muster sufficient personal pride to bristle at Dean's obvious assumption that he's too weak to wield the weapon effectively. However, as demonstrated by the militants in Syria, humans are perfectly capable of wielding Hands of God to devastating effect. And Castiel is not about to let either Winchester sacrifice himself. Patiently, he starts to explain this. "Dean--"

"I just got you back!" It's almost shrill. Almost panic. It shows in Dean's eyes, the anger that had been banking there cracking open to reveal something wild and desperate. He's afraid. Castiel stares, speechless.

Dean shuts his eyes. Squares his shoulders; firms his mouth. When he opens his eyes again, he's leashed his fear, and all his sleepy softness has turned hard. "It's too early for this. I'm gonna make coffee, and then we're gonna find another way." With one more forbidding look, he stalks off to the kitchen.

Another way. Because Dean is afraid not that Castiel will fail, but that he'll succeed. Because success will mean his death. Because Dean cares less for Castiel's capacity for usefulness than for his life. Because to Dean, Castiel is not expend--

Castiel pushes mechanically to his feet. He walks back to the small, still darkness of his bedroom; he closes and locks the door behind himself. He sits carefully on his bed, sheets crumpled beneath him. He watches the thin line of light at the bottom of his door.

He listens to footsteps approach from down the hall, the soft slap of slippers on cement. They slow as they near Castiel's room; the line of light dims as they stop right in front of his door.

Quietly, and muffled through the door, Dean says, "Dammit, Cas." He leaves without knocking.

Castiel breathes mechanically until his next breath shudders on its way in.

* * *

Around the bunker's overgrown, man-made hill, Kansas unfolds like paper. Fields stretch to the horizon, fuzzed with the green shoots of crops or furrowed with freshly-churned black earth. The occasional weathered tree or fencepost stands out in the flat sprawl, old sentries marking old boundaries. The nearest visible buildings are a miniaturized white house and red barn one county road over.

The air is fresh. The sky is a cloudless, darkening blue. The road is empty. It's a quiet evening. Peaceful.

Castiel stands at the mouth of the lane that meanders from the paved road past the bunker's sunken door, toeing the line where weedy grasses give way to the road's gravel shoulder. He feels exposed.

He dials his phone and raises it to his ear.

Claire answers after three rings. "Oh my god, an actual phone call? The kind where I get to hear your voice and don't get RSI in my thumbs? What's the occasion, Cas?"

He smiles at her teasing, indulging himself. "Hello, Claire. How are you?"

"Hungry. Jody said she'd bring home pizza tonight, but a couple of tools in Alex's class decided to cut school to steal street signs, so she has to wait for their parents to pick them up from the station and give everybody involved the disapproving eyebrow."

"She didn't arrest these tools?"

"Nah. Everybody steals a street sign once or twice. Whether it turns out to be a gateway crime depends on the quality of the eyebrow you get from the cop that catches you. You can't leave that shit to the deputies."

Her cheerful mood leads Castiel to indulge himself further: he asks about her day. She tells him about the work she's doing for Sheriff Mills at the station in exchange for tutoring in investigative skills; the used car she's eying; the hour she spent at the gun range. Despite his misgivings over her choice to pursue hunting as a vocation, something blooms warm and thankful inside him. She sounds happy.

"So what about you? Like, don't get me wrong, it's good to know you're still kicking, but these days you don't really call just to chat."

The warm bloom frosts over. A wary note has crept into her voice. She'd had a good day, and now he's on the verge of spoiling it. He shakes his head. "I'm fine. It's not important."

"Cas."

"Really, it's not urgent. I'll, I'll call you another--"

" _Cas_. Why'd you call?"

His deferrals die on his tongue. "I wanted to ask." He hesitates, then resolves himself. "I wanted to ask how it felt when you said yes."

Claire is silent for a long time. Long enough that Castiel is opening his mouth to apologise and retract the question and end the call when she says, "I don't remember a lot."

She sounds cautious. Not unwilling; careful. He wonders if this is the first time she's put words around her experience as a vessel.

"You were...busy. Not like, you were doing a lot. You _were_ a lot. And I...wasn't." Her breath huffs down the line, a not-laugh. "I wasn't much at all.

"I remember more about when you were gone." More confident now, gaining strength. "I couldn't catch my breath. My heart was racing. I was so scared, and confused, and--and angry. And that was me. All of that was _mine_. It wasn't much, but it was. Everything."

The pride in her voice makes him ache. For him, relinquishing his possession had been as easy as thought. For her, it had felt like a triumph. "I'm sorry, Claire."

"Yeah, well," she says, dry and dismissive. But not cruel. "Why? What'd it feel like for you?"

Castiel was an angel when Lucifer took possession; he hadn't overwhelmed him the way Castiel had overwhelmed Claire and Jimmy. Castiel's passivity was voluntary.

And when Lucifer was cast out, leaving Castiel alive and alone in himself, it had felt like a failure.

Above him, the wide sky is turning a depthless navy; expanses of flat earth close in on every side. He's surrounded by emptiness. Displayed in it.

He wonders if there's anything to see.

"It's different for angels," he says.

* * *

When Castiel sets out for a walk into Lebanon, the morning air is thick with humidity. In the distance, gauzy sheets of rain hang like torn drapes from the low, bluish-gray sky.

On foot, it takes twenty-eight minutes to reach the outer edges of town. The rain meets him after fifteen. It begins falling all at once: not a downpour, but a light, steady shower. It falls on the grass and the dirt and the asphalt Castiel walks alongside, on his hair and jacket and face. Aside from the tread of his footsteps, the soft rushing patter of raindrops is the only sound.

The first time Castiel was human, rain was almost always an enemy. Itinerant as he was, it was difficult to find places to shelter or dry off; driven by wind tunnels between buildings and in underpasses, rain pelted him, soaked mercilessly through his meagre layers of clothing, lay slick and clammy on his skin, chilled his bones. In gray daylight, it seemed to heighten the uncomfortable grit of cement and brick and pavement. At nighttime, under the streetlamps, it coated the city like an oil slick.

Now, with the bunker an easy few minutes away, the gentle fall of rain feels refreshing on Castiel's face. It takes its time seeping through the thick corduroy of his new jacket. Smith County has gone many days without rain; the sprawling fields seem to bask under the shower, content to drink their fill. The rain feels peaceable.

Castiel is marvelling at the revelation of how much he likes walking in this rain-muted world when it's rumbled by a low, familiar engine. The Impala growls up behind him and slows, pulling alongside.

"I guess you're one of those people who needs to be told to come in out of the rain," Dean says, dividing his attention between frowning at Castiel out the window and keeping the car crawling straight on the road.

Castiel keeps walking. "It's not storming. I'm enjoying the fresh air."

"You're getting soaked, man. You're gonna get sick."

Castiel doesn't see a direct correlation between being wet and contracting an illness. "I'll be fine."

"Cas. Get in the car."

"As you said, I'm soaked. I'll get water all over the seat."

" _Cas._ Please."

The sudden defeat in Dean's voice pulls Castiel up short. He turns to find the car stopped a few feet behind him, Dean looking through the rain-streaked windshield with a strangely bleak expression. Relenting, Castiel circles around to the passenger side to do as he asked.

"Thank you," Dean mutters once his door is shut. Reaching into the back seat, he pulls a coarse gray blanket up to the front and drops it in Castiel's lap; then, returning his hands to the wheel, he drives.

They ride in silence. Dean stares front. Castiel uses the blanket to rub water out of his hair.

Not far from where Dean picked him up, the shoulder widens into a short lane that bridges the shallow ditch between the road and a field just starting to sprout its crop. Dean slows the car as they approach, and turns carefully onto the potholed path; coasts ahead until the front tires dip from the hard-packed lane into the muddy field; brakes and parks and turns off the ignition.

Rain drums down on the car, loud in the abrupt absence of engine noise.

Dean's hands slide around the steering wheel to fall into his lap. "What are we doing here, Cas?" he says, sounding tired. He looks at him sidelong before dropping his gaze, shaking his head. "I can't--I don't know how to talk to you. I don't know what to say."

Castiel eyes him, his own hands closing slowly around a fold of the blanket. "What do you want to say?"

For some reason, Dean smiles. It's small and bitter and effacing, there and gone in an instant. Castiel wonders how much of what he wants to say he's about to keep held behind his teeth. "When you were gone, I kept thinking: we'll get him back, he'll be okay. Things'll make sense. But you--I don't understand anything you do, man. Half the time, it's like you're still gone." He looks across the seat again, frustration ticking in his jaw. "Did you even want to come back from that? Is that why you said yes to him? Were you trying to get yourself killed?"

Castiel can't find the words to deny it. He shakes his head, but says nothing, and Dean's frustration frays into dismay. Castiel can't look at him. He turns to the window, but it's starting to fog over, closing them in.

"And now--" It sounds like the same brittle anger Dean showed in the bunker's library, cracks of fear spidering through. "--now you're tracking down Hands of God like you can't wait to burn yourself out, and you're wandering around in the goddamn rain like you can't catch a cold, and I gotta think, Cas, if you were that unhappy when you were an angel--"

"I was. I was unhappy." Weakened by Rowena's spell. Injured and rejected by his brothers and sisters, again, and mourning those of his siblings who had died because of him, again. Lonely in the bunker when Sam and Dean went on hunts, and reluctant to venture outside for fear of what new harm he might do. Helpless against the Darkness, and keenly aware of it.

"So you went out and gave yourself to Lucifer? That's what you figured would make you feel better?"

"He gave me purpose, Dean."

Dean makes a derisive noise. "You and your fucking thing about being useful."

"If I became his vessel, he would stop tormenting Sam." He's found his words. Justifications and excuses. They're still not denials. "He would destroy Amara--he succeeded against her before, there was no reason to believe he couldn't do it again--and you would be free of her thrall. And I--and I could--"

"What, Cas? You could what?"

"Stop." It's the exact opposite of a denial. Castiel admits, "I could stop. For a while."

The rain is tapering off outside: only the occasional drop taps down onto the car. In the quiet, Dean's utter stillness rings. When he speaks, his exasperation has collapsed into something shaken and aching. "Jesus, Cas."

Castiel had feared Dean would be disappointed by his confession; he hadn't expected him to be devastated. He certainly hadn't intended it. His intentions do persist in being meaningless. "I asked you once if you would rather have peace, or freedom." They'd been sitting exactly where they are now: Dean behind the wheel, Castiel in the passenger seat. Except it had been night, and they'd left Kansas hours before, and it had been Dean who was struggling with wanting, very much, to stop. "I've since learned that angels, when presented that same choice, will always, uniformly, choose peace. It's all I've ever chosen. Even when I thought I was choosing freedom, it always turned out not to be so. Just more of the same, in different guises." Sighing, he looks up. "I've chosen peace so many times, Dean, yet I've never actually had it."

Dean watches him for a moment, pale and thoughtful. Steadier now. "You're not an angel anymore, Cas."

"No," Castiel agrees. "Not anymore."

He relaxes, but only a fraction. "You still unhappy?"

Castiel considers the dark little pocket of consciousness where he hid inside desperate indifference for months; how long he resisted leaving it. The realisation afterward, reluctant and guilty, of how he'd been missed. Sam's TV and easy companionship. Claire's perspective. The empty cases of beer stacked in the bunker's garage, a tower that's grown steadily since he's been back. "Are you?"

Dean blinks in surprise. The corners of his mouth twitch upward. Wryly, equal parts joke and deflection, he says, "I asked you first, man."

The car has become stuffy. The windows have fogged over completely now, and the heavy blanket in Castiel's lap is too warm. There are no longer any isolated raindrops plunking down on the roof, so he says, "It's stopped raining," willing it to be so as he opens the door.

The air outside the car is much better: cooler than it was before the rain, and fresh with petrichor. The sky is starting to lighten, the low clouds teasing apart to let bright wisps of blue show through. Castiel walks a few steps into the field, the soft ground spongy beneath his feet, and stops at the front of the Impala, resting his hand lightly on its water-beaded hood. He looks at the countless green shoots poking up out of the muddy field, small but hardy, vibrant with the dust washed off. New growth.

"I almost didn't hear you," he muses. Glancing over at where Dean has rounded the front of the car, he finds a faint crease of confusion on his face. "When you summoned me to cast out Lucifer. When you prayed. I didn't want to hear you. You would have made me question my decision." Fondness wells up inside him, and Castiel smiles. "You always make me question."

Dean's eyes go round. Colour returns to his cheeks, a little more red than usual. His gaze darts down from Castiel's eyes, then back up; his tongue darts out over his bottom lip.

Castiel's smile broadens. "Dean, would you like to watch Kimmy Schmidt with me?"

The confusion returns, but Dean's smiling now, too. "Who's Kimmy Schmidt?"

"It's a television show. A 'Netflix Original'."

Dean's smile reaches his eyes: they gleam, and crinkle at the corners. "Yeah, Cas, I'll watch with you. What's it about?"

"It's about surviving the apocalypse," Castiel tells him. "And finding your place in the world when you're free."

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Title and summary from The Firesign Theater's Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, which Cas was enjoying in his head in 'Hell's Angel'.
> 
> 2) Some dramatic license has been taken with the character of Lebanon, KS. On Streetview, it looks like a perfectly nice little town.
> 
> 3) Okay, look, I'd written everything but the last half of the last scene before 'Don't Call Me Shurley' aired. As I wanted/needed to post before 'All In the Family' jossed the whole story (because I'm sure it will), I was not going to kill myself trying to rewrite for explicit canon-compliance with one stupid little thing like the gee-dee return of gee-dee God. Handwave with me, friends. Handwave with me.
> 
> 4) Original intention: healing!cock. Amended intention halfway through writing: tender kissing. Finished fic: gen as fuck. *hands*


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